Quantifying aggregate-level telework occasions and their impacts on vehicle-miles traveled in the US

초록

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected individuals' daily lives and the economy at large, in particular generating unprecedented plummets of all travel demand indicators. In the US, the annual vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) in 2020 plunged by 11% compared to VMT in 2019, and at the national scale had not fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels by 2023. On the other hand, teleworking was widely adopted during the pandemic, and the share of teleworkers has remained high. This study aims to quantify the aggregate amount of teleworking for three regions (US nationwide, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria), and to forecast VMT while accounting for telework effects. We build national/metropolitan level (pre-pandemic) VMT models, propose a method of accounting for telework engagement and adjust VMT predictions accordingly, and evaluate the accuracy of our telework-adjusted VMT forecasts using data through 2023. We argue that for better VMT forecasting, the number of telework occasions should be accounted for, and thus we discuss how to estimate them. We estimate that, in 2019, there were about 17.8 million teleworkers and about 1.5 billion telework occasions at the national level. The pandemic sharply increased the share of teleworkers, and that share has remained substantially higher than pre-pandemic. This implies that about 1.6% and 4.3-5.3% of US annual VMT were reduced by teleworking in 2019 and 2020-2023 respectively. After accounting for the additional telework effects, our VMT forecasts approach the observed VMT more closely errors of 6.2% before vs. 2.6% after, and 4.3% vs. 1.4%, in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

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